mizducky

Tossed salad was a nightly dinner requirement in my family too--in fact, making the salad was often my dinner chore. I dutifully learned and followed my parents' Salad Construction Template, which had several key rules: 1. Always use two types of lettuce--the inevitable iceberg, plus--surprisingly, given it was the 1960s--a bitter green like chicory or curly endive. I have no idea how my folks got onto that. It actually did perk up the otherwise mundane salad quite a bit. 2. Always use an onion product--red, white, or green (scallions) were the three choices, sliced thinly. We used the whole scallion, white and green. 3. Always include tomatoes--no matter how tasteless they might be. Usually cut in wedges or chunks so they wouldn't disintegrate. Sometimes we'd use cherry tomatoes instead. 4. Always add at least one more element for color and contrast. The usual culprits in this category were red radishes (pain in the butt to slice the little things), cucumbers (peeled but not seeded), and occasionally slivered red cabbage. We used to almost always make our own dressing. For some reason my folks liked their dressing extremely tart, typically one part each of lemon juice, red wine vinegar, and oil (thinking back, I bet the puckery dressing started from my mother's obsession about oil being "bad" and "fattening"). We'd mix into the dressing some salt and pepper, some crushed dried herbs, perhaps a little dry mustard, and a pressed clove of garlic. One time I was pressing the poor clove of garlic so hard that it went shooting out of the press like a bullet, and promptly vanished into some recess in the kitchen. We looked for that damn garlic clove for weeks afterward and never found it. Eventually it became a running joke/legend in the family--we figured one day we'd need to replace the fridge, and would find splatted on the wall behind it the fossilized remains of the Phantom Clove. Anyway--this dressing concoction had nowhere near enough emulsifying agents in it to keep it emulsified, so you had to shake it up like crazy and immediately pour it on the salad before it separated again. Oh yeah, and we dressed the salad in the bowl well before serving, blithely unconcerned that the poor thing would be kinda wilted by the time we got around to eating it. Bowls of salad were eaten along with dinner. My mom was another firm believer in having two vegetable sides with every dinner--usually the salad would be one, and a frozen-reheated vegetable the other. As various family members began doing time in Weight Watchers meetings, the pre-dressing of the salad would give way to a small forest of bottled diet dressings arrayed on the dinner table. As I recall, all of those were pretty wretched-tasting. Sometimes I would substitute a wedge of iceberg lettuce annointed with diet "french" dressing--the scary orange goop. I still can't believe I ate that stuff. When we went out to dinner, often as not at the local diner, salads would be pretty similar to what we made at home, so I spent my youth assuming that was what a salad was supposed to be. I remember going to a friend's house for dinner once and being served a spinach salad for the first time. In hindsight, it was a pretty rudimentary spinach salad--the raw greens, some grated hardboiled egg, some cold crumbled bacon--but I thought it was so exotic and gourmet. This friend's dad also drove a Saab, the only one I had ever seen up to that point, and worked for PBS producing documentaries, and somehow from these few facts I constructed this whole image of cosmopolitan intellectual/artistic types all driving exotic imported cars and dining on raw rather than frozen reheated spinach. Ah, the innocence of youth. Nowadays, I cannot for the life of me figure out why we were so into that iceberg lettuce. Once in a blue moon I buy a head of it, and inevitably wind up throwing it out barely used. Cellulose and water. What in the world is the point? Meanwhile, my salad-making, while far less frequent, has become much more appetizing. And I learned how to make a proper vinaigrette, with a more normal ratio of oil to vinegar, and enough mustard to hold it together.

It's important to distinguish between those corners of vegetarian cuisine which rely on tofu dogs, soyburgers, etc. to assuage reluctant vegetarians with middle-American food tastes, and, say, the centuries-old Asian Buddhist cuisines in which soy products are transformed into deliciously convincing meat analogues. The latter might as well be coming from a whole different planet from the former, in terms of taste, quality, aesthetic, tradition, everything. There's a whole lot more to quality vegetarian cuisine, and a whole lot more of it going on, than those admittedly wretched tofu dogs and soyburgers. I'm not even a vegetarian, and I still find myself frustrated that a lot of people keep bringing up the bad exemplars as if they were fair or even majority representations of the whole category. Just think, if one were to similarly judge omnivore cuisine solely by encounters with the huge numbers of mediocre chain restaurants out there, one could similarly--and just as erroneously--get away with claiming that the majority of omnivore cuisine was absolutely wretched too. Great veg. cuisine is out there. But IMO there's just a plain old lack of motivation for non-vegetarians to get over their preconceptions and seek it out.

I almost forgot to post about my very first experience with an Applebee's. (See how big an impression it made on me? ) I was meeting a bunch of people this past Sunday evening to see a movie, and they decided to get dinner beforehand, and this was the food place closest to the theater. Wouldn't have been my choice, but I figured "what the hell, how bad could it possibly be?" Well, I've had lots worse meals, but boy was this ever a mediocre one for the money. Interesting that the article cited in the previous post goes on about Applebee's recent shrimp fixation. It was in full swing at this outpost--something like half the entrees in the big laminated menu had shrimp stuck in 'em somewhere or other. However, on my first circuit through the menu almost nothing appealed to me. Finally, I aimed directly into the shrimp fixation, and ordered "Crispy Buttermilk Shrimp," described in the menu as "a heaping platter of shrimp, lightly breaded and fried to perfection. Served with garlic mashed potatoes, seasonal vegetables, garlic toast and cocktail dipping sauce." What is it with this "to perfection" menu-speak? Aaaaaaah ... whatever. Thinking back to childhood encounters with fried seafood at HoJo's, I again figured "how bad could it possibly be?" When the dish arrived I realized my mistake--duh, breaded seafood is a prime opportunity to go for pre-breaded frozen stuff. Needless to say, the shrimp looked nothing like the glamour photo shown in the menu (and second on right on their corporate website): flat cardboardy breading that was neither particularly crispy nor buttermilky--in fact, it didn't taste like much of anything. Further, the garlic toast was not particularly garlicky; mashed potatoes were gluey; seasonal vegetables were dried out; hell, even the cocktail sauce was pretty insipid. Given the quality, I suppose I should have been glad it was not the "heaping platter" quantities ballyhooed in the menu; but given the price, glad was one thing I was not. Perhaps if I'd stuck with something real simple like a burger ... (but maybe I didn't want to see how they could screw that up...) Yeah, I'm another person who tends to see most chains as a predictable necessity at best and an abomination at worst, but I submit that my prejudice against them is not snobbery but realism, based on encouters such as the above. (Plus, given my penchant for cheapo ethnic hole-in-the-wall eateries, I think I can hardly be accused of food snobbery). To be sure, I make a few idiosyncratic exceptions for chains like Carl's Jr.--yes, their burgers are killer--and McCormick and Shmick's--the ones I've been to have been pretty darned good. And at three A.M. with a belly fulla booze and a head fulla loud rock music, inhaling a pile of greasy things in a Denny's is a pretty good thing to do. But in general, I feel justified in viewing most food chains with suspicion, unless and until one proves it's an exception to the rule.

Marshmallows have their place. Though you probably have to have been raised at the kids' table in a home where a crusty-gold pan of sweet potato hunks, dripping with cinnamony-buttery-syrup glistening in streams from each spoonful, with handfuls of the big white pillows tossed on top for a two-minute journey through the oven at the last moment...the resulting brown-encrusted pan of tooth-aching glory is a sanctity unto itself, like a bite of Autumn which must be consumed before the leaves will drift and the snow fly. (Though the prospect of snow where I come from is scarce, and the leaves just turn brown and drop). The idea of marshmallows on the plate, outside their realm of toasted-on-a-stick and sagging gently to cover s'mores, is foreign to a great number of raised-outside-the-South folks. Sue Grafton, speaking as her nifty, otherwise-clever character Kinsey Milhone, said once that the prospect of marshmallows on sweet potatoes was as appetizing as licorice on broccoli. Now THAT is a nauseating comparison, and all-round slur upon the taste of all Southern cooks. Just try it once, like I ventured to try a lox/tomato/onion/schmear-laden bagel and never looked back. ← Heh. Well, now that you've invoked one of my heritage's soul foods ... For what it's worth, I find most recipes for sweet-potato tzimmes too sweet for my tastes as well. I'm just not all that much of a sweet potato fan in the first place, regardless of the dish's ethnicity. Even completely plain, I can only take 'em in smallish doses--a little as a side dish is nice enough, but more than a little I find too rich and cloying. In fact, over the years I've tried to invent some kind of sweet potato recipe for Thanksgiving that takes the dish in a savory rather than sweet direction, just to cut the tubers' natural sweetness down to my liking--Indian curry-type spicing was showing a lot of potential, though I still haven't quite hit the magic formula. I might do better if I can mentally categorize sweet potatoes with marshmallows as dessert rather than a side dish ... perhaps paradoxically, I do like sweet potato pie quite a bit (more than most pumpkin pies, actually).

Re: disposable aluminum roasting pans--yeah, those things are always a disaster waiting to happen, just way too flimsy for the turkeys they're supposedly meant to contain. But a good-quality roasting pan can put a major dent in one's wallet (I'm assuming from your comment about "grad student dinner" that you're on a grad student's budget). There are, however, a few work-arounds I have found: 1) check your local second-hand shops and thrift stores for good-quality used roasting pans; 2) those old-school cheapo speckled enamel-ware roasters actually work pretty well, and can often be found at cheap prices at your local mega-box store; 3) if you do have to fall back on the disposable aluminum jobbies, buy two or three of 'em and use them nested together for greater strength; 4) also, putting a big cookie sheet under a disposable pan (nested or otherwise) will lend further structural integrity, especially when lifting the whole contraption into and out of the oven. In any case, do make sure to use a rack even with the disposable pan--it allows air to circulate around the bird for better roasting, it gets the bird up and out of the drippings so it's not braising rather than roasting its backside, and it keeps the bird from getting vulcanized to the bottom of the roaster (which can really do in one of those flimsy disposable pans).

I actually started subbing vermouth for white wine based on Julia's recommendation. I was afraid the flavor difference would throw things off, but found it worked quite nicely for anything requiring the odd glassful of wine here or there, like an impromptu risotto. Like others have said, if I were making a dish where the wine would be a major presence, I'd buy a wine more suited to being that major presence. But for quickie little additions of wine, vermouth does pretty darn good.

I am pleased to report that, though I have sat through some godawful Thanksgiving massacres*, I have yet to have anything with marshmallows inflicted on me. Dunno how I was so lucky. My brussels sprouts recipe is dirt-simple. Truth in advertising: it's based on a recipe I got out of the Seattle Times over a decade ago, but I made it a little more go-with-the-flow: --couple pounds of brussels sprouts --maple syrup (I like the grade B dark) --mustard (I like a nice grainy one like Plochman's Stoneground) --vinegar (a white wine or apple cider one is best for the color, but often I'll use a red-wine one because I just like the flavor better) --extra-virgin olive oil (a light fruity one is best for this purpose) --fresh ground pepper, salt Make a vinaigrette dressing with all the ingredients that are not brussels sprouts , adjusting the proportions to your liking (I like to go easy on the maple syrup, adding just enough so that the maple flavor balances against the vinegar and mustard, but not so much that the whole thing gets overly sweet). Trim up and halve the brussels sprouts (you can quarter any that are bigger than the rest, but it's better that you try and get all tiny ones because they taste better). Cook the sprouts in a large quantity of boiling salted water just long enough for them to turn bright green and barely tender enough to eat; shock 'em in ice water, but only briefly--you want 'em still warm. While they're still warm, place them in a non-reactive container and pour the vinaigrette over them. Marinate, refridgerated, overnight. Let them warm back up to room temp before serving. *Speaking of massacres, one of my family's beloved non-food-related Thanksgiving traditions was the annual playing of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" in its entirety, which long rambling yarn does start off with a Thanksgiving dinner--which dinner did not actually take place at Alice's restaurant, and "Alice's Restaurant" wasn't even the name of Alice's restaurant, but I can't remember what her restaurant was actually called, but I can still recite whole passages from the story by rote, so it obviously made a big impression on me. Now *that's* what I call an alternative Thanksgiving tradition!

If we all ever do get our cycles in sync, God/ess help the eGullet servers! We shall swamp them with our tales of derring-do! (Or should these deeds be called derring-don't? ) It is an awesome sensation to feel one's hormones shifting gears on one's metabolic transmission, let me tell ya. I started the first full day of my actual period still in devour-everything-not-nailed-down-or-running-away mode ... and then all of a sudden I felt dizzy and light-headed, went to lie down for awhile, and upon arising spent the next eighteen hours forgetting to eat anything at all. Isn't biology wonderful?

Another lovely and entertaining blog! Heh. Many's the time, back when I had a Costco membership, that I made lunch out of a Costco food sample graze. I even had a circuit worked out in which I would scope bargains and snarf samples prior to actually getting on with putting items in my cart. And then after I made it through the check-out I'd hit up the cafe for a Polish sausage. Dunno the answer to your question, but that's certainly an entertaining juxtapositioning of items on that plate. Looks like you've got a Vietnames rice-paper shrimp wrap; chili dog with onions; and a chocolate-chip cannoli. My kinda meal!

What? Cutlery? You mean you don't bite the head off, suck out the juice, pop the whole shrimp into your mouth, suck the juice off the shell, roll the shrimp around catching the shell with your tongue and teeth to peel the shrimp, spit the shell out, eat the meat? It takes practice. Hubby still uses his fingers. My brother and I are the only ones in the family who eats shrimp in the shell this way. ← Thank you. I am now duly reassured that pretty much anything goes in the pursuit of the yummy bits short of causing bodily harm to either myself or bystanders.

Looks gorgeous! I have a "dumb" question, though: I never know, with various Chinese shrimp/prawn dishes in which the shells are left on, whether or not to eat the critters shells and all. So--how about with this recipe? And is there a general rule of thumb? (Oops, I guess that's two questions ...) Help save me from prawn ettiquette purgatory here!

Yeah, that review is a riot. But my favorite line was: I think you might be better off getting the new stuff, which actually got a decent review from these guys. Or maybe just a commemorative coffee mug with the original label/logo, which IMO is a really lovely hunk o' nostalgia (regardless of the quality of the coffee it decorates).

Heh. Having grown up as a dedicated coffee drinker in the New York Metro area (I was drinking coffee with Sunday brunch as early as age 12, which was in 1968), I remember Chock Full O' Nuts ... but I personally don't remember it as being particularly remarkable coffee. By the time we ran it through our Pyrex percolator (which was really cool looking, but was, after all, a percolator), any brand of coffee tasted pretty much the same. Back then, coffee was coffee, and there really wasn't any kind of gourmet-coffee thing floating around. When I went to college in Boston in 1975 and wandered into my first for-real gourmet coffee house (the old Coffee Connection in Harvard Square, which, sadly, has long since been bought out by $tarbux), and tasted my first Viennese roast in my first french press pot, it was a revelation. Even after all my previous coffee drinking, I had never realized coffee was capable of being so complex and rich in flavor. Nowadays, even the random $tarbux-knockoff grind-your-own coffees I find in supermarkets taste (IMO) worlds better than the coffees I drank as a kid. Some of that, I'm willing to bet, is simply the difference between using a modern drip coffeemaker instead of a percolator. Some is using fresh-ground beans instead of pre-ground from a can. But I think some is really due to the fact that even today's pseudo-gourmet supermarket coffee is better than the stuff we got in the 1960s--better beans, better roasted. Mind you, I could be totally wrong about that last ... Anyway, srhcb, I expect your business associate will probably be touched at your gesture of serving the Chock Full O' Nuts, but I also suspect he won't be able detect anything special about it unless you somehow have the can prominently displayed where he can see it. FYI: here's a review of Chock Full O' Nuts regular pre-ground coffee (the stuff most like what we drank in the 1960s), and a review of their new-fangled whole-bean 100% Columbian. Note that the new stuff gets a pretty good review, while the old-school stuff gets rather less so.

An excellent point. Follow the foods. From what little I've learned of Filipino cuisine so far, it seems like an especially vivid example of taking cuisine influences from a huge number of different cultures and melding them into something distinctly their own. (Reminds me I need to go do a little more turo-turo research ... ) And I also find myself wondering what a lot of the super-spicy cuisines of Asia were like before they adopted chiles--were they as hot? What did they use for the heat? Somebody got a pointer to books/scholars/etc. who explore this facet of culinary history? (It's kind of a hard concept to cram into a Google search string.)

A new development--I am possibly buddying-up with another church member who is willing to volunteer her nice big house as an event location, but who doesn't want to create an event herself. She and I just talked, and I pitched my current three favorite ideas at her (the seder, an all-Indian meal, and the risotto meal). She suggested checking what other meals have been submitted so far, to avoid overlap (she happens to be involved in putting together the auction catalog, so she's got a direct line on that info). I'll probably find out more tomorrow when I see her at church.

I had not previously known about this dish, but as I'm always looking for new ways to work greens into my meals, I'm definitely going to give this a whirl. Got a pointer to a likely recipe? Or do you just mash away and combine? Thanks!

Percy, the tranced-out look on your cat's face when she's accepting morsels from you is just totally cracking me up.

If a drunken duck behaves anything like a drunken bluejay, I'm not sure I'd want to be the person picking 'em up.

Percy, best wishes to your aunt for a speedy and full recovery. That roast pork sandwich looks marvelous. Somehow I never thought of putting cooked greens of any sort in/on a sandwich. I'll have to try that myself some time.

Re: the ladies who lunched (but didn't change tires)--oh dear! But that all-mushroom picnic--that sounds really lovely. As does the idea of a picnic in general--plus it handles the problem of event location, and involves all prepared-in-advance foods. Hmmmm ... I'm gonna have a tough time deciding here, folks!

I believe there's seven--Europe, Africa, Asia/Russia, North America, South America, Australia, and Antarctica. All of which would be at the very least intriguing (roast penguin, anyone? How about roast kangaroo? ) Actually, I had an Eeeeeeevil thought for a donated dinner, but I bet it wouldn't get very far--an All Offal Dinner based on Fergus Henderson's work. I'd sure as heck have fun, but somehow I fear I'd be one of the few people in the congregation who'd be into it.

Ooooh, more fun options! New Orleans food definitely lends itself well to parties and to feeding a crowd. And I can manage a fairly decent roux. The Christmas Past thing could be a lot of fun too--there's even a sorta-kinda Unitarian tie-in, inasmuch as Charles Dickens is on record as at least a Unitarian sympathizer if not an actual member. And a whole bunch of modern UUs are into Neo-Paganism, so styling the dinner as a Yule feast would appeal to that contingent. But as I have no experience whatsoever with those olde English Yule dishes, experimenting on guests at a fundraiser might not be the most prudent idea. (Fighting mightily to avoid all jokes about cooking my goose ... and obviously failing ... )

← Alas, I don't have a subscription to Nature, and I can't totally justify blowing the 30 bucks to read the full article. But I'm saving the link. Agreed about the shakiness of extrapolating from "in vitro" data. Re COX-1/COX-2 inhibitor side-effect issues: I was under the impression that the evidence was indeed implicating COX-2 suppression across all NSAIDs, though the issue is more pronounced with the selective COX-2 inhibitors (including Celebrex and Bextra as well as Vioxx) than with the non-specific COX-1/COX-2 inhibitors (such as ibuprofen). At any rate, looks like the FDA is acting accordingly, specifying stiffer labeling warning of cardiovascular risk for all such products still left on the market (see here. It should be added that these risks and fatal side-effects only show up after long-term (18 months or longer) daily maintenance use of these drugs at dosages sufficient to mediate chronic pain conditions such as arthritis. As the amounts of anti-inflamatory agent they're talking about in olive oil seem to be a good bit lower than the amount of NSAID you'd take to fight arthritis pain (1.75 oz of olive oil roughly equal to the effects of 10% of a working dose of ibuprofen), I think the risk from the olive oil is much less of a concern--you'd have to tank on an unpalatable amount of oil on a daily basis to equal the amount of NSAID taken by your typical arthritis patient. So why bother with the olive-oil thang if it's such a low dose? (assuming the finding holds up to in vivo testing, of course...) As the WebMD article says: So I guess they're visualizing a daily hit of EVOO as maybe being something like the daily baby aspirin prescribed for many heart patients.

heheheheh -- yeah, one of the hazards of doing these things is that you have no control over who winds up purchasing the meal. Fortunately, I have yet to run into anyone in my congregation that drives me crazy--but then food get-togethers, like traveling, can be one of those social crucibles in which you discover heretofore-unexpected weirdnesses in other people. There was another meal I donated in this way, the final half-hour of which was disrupted when half the diners unceremoniously picked up and moved to the TV room to watch a football game (and it wasn't meant to be a football-themed meal). Like anything, ya just gotta go with the flow, I guess. Although--now here's another advantage of going with the seder idea: it's understood at the git-go that everyone is supposed to hang out for the whole meal, that's the point of the program. I think I'm talking myself into the seder concept...

I dunno about others, but in the meal-auctions I've participated in before, the donor donates it all--time, labor, materials, and (usually) location too--and the entirety of the winning bidder's money goes to the designated charity (subtracting only for the overhead, if any, of running the auction). As I said, I don't have a suitable location to donate, so I'm resorting to specifying that the meal gets done in the winning bidder's home, and the person organizing this latest auction is totally okay with that. As to the structure/extent of the meal, it can be just about anything--and one assumes that in the auction the bidding will reflect the relative size/expense/glitz of the meal on offer as well as its interest/popularity factor. Heh--that's another reason why the seder's attractive to me: yeah, it's a lot of work, but the ingredients tend to be (relatively!) inexpensive compared to other things one could do. In previous auctions for other groups, my six-to-eight person full dinners have pulled about a couple hundred bucks in winning bids. I was a little regretful that they didn't go for more, but that was a function of a live auction run by enthusiastic amateurs as opposed to experienced auctioneers, and it really didn't *bug* me--I just felt sorry that the organization in question didn't benefit quite as much as I hoped it would. What the heck. The meals themselves were ever so much fun. One in particular, the winning bidder had a *wonderful* wine collection, which he proceeded to be very generous with--including fueling up the cook as she readied their repast. Woo hoo!!!